Authorities with the US-led occupation have begun a covert campaign to recruit and train agents with the once-dreaded Iraqi intelligence service to help identify resistance to American forces here after months of increasingly sophisticated attacks and bombings, according to US and Iraqi officials. The extraordinary move to recruit agents of former President Saddam Hussein’s brutal security services underscores a growing recognition among US officials that American military forces — already stretched thin — cannot alone prevent attacks like the devastating truck bombing of the UN headquarters this week, they said. Authorities have stepped up the recruitment over the past two weeks, one senior US official said, despite sometimes adamant objections by Iraqi officials in the Iraqi Governing Council, who complain that they have too little control over the pool of recruits. 3 killed in Najaf blast, tension flares up in north Iraq BAGHDAD: A bomb blast killed three bodyguards in the office of one of Iraq’s main Shiite Muslim groups on Sunday, a spokesman for the group said, as ethnic violence flared between Kurds and Turkmen in the north. The blast in Najaf and the ethnic clashes around Kirkuk stoked tensions in a country already grappling with lawlessness and a guerrilla insurgency. US Army arrests Former Iraqi general Erzeyek FALLUJAH: The US Army arrested ex-Iraqi general Subhi Kamal Erzeyek on Sunday in Hit, his nephew said. ‘‘My uncle, who was a director of the Al-Quds brigades, was arrested in his friend’s house at Hit,’’ said H. Khaled. Red Cross to cut staff, UN finds new HQs in Baghdad BAGHDAD: The International Committee of the Red Cross is reducing its Baghdad staff due to security concerns after the attack on the UN HQ . ‘‘We are forced to reduce our staff in Baghdad,’’ Nada Doumani, the ICRC spokesperson in Baghdad, said on Sunday. The UN said on Sunday it had found new headquarters in Baghdad. ‘‘We have found new premises that will be ready in a few days,’’ spokesperson Veronique Taveau said. . (Agencies) While US officials acknowledge the sensitivity of cooperating with a force that embodied the ruthlessness of Saddam’s rule, they assert that an urgent need for better and more precise intelligence has forced unusual compromises. ‘‘The only way you can combat terrorism is through intelligence,’’ the official said. ‘‘It’s the only way you’re going to stop these people from doing what they’re doing.’’ He added: ‘‘Without Iraqi input, that’s not going to work.’’ Officials are reluctant to disclose how many former agents have been recruited. But Iraqi officials say they number anywhere from dozens to a few hundred, and US officials acknowledge the recruitment is extensive. ‘‘We’re reaching out widely,’’ said one official. Added a Western diplomat: ‘‘There is an obvious evolution. First the police are reconstituted, then the army. It is logical that intelligence officials from the regime would also be recruited.’’ Officials say the first line of intelligence-gathering remains the Iraqi police. But that force is hampered in intelligence work by a lack of credibility with a disenchanted public, and its numbers remain far below what US officials say they need to bring order to an unruly capital. Across Iraq, walk-in informers have provided tips on weapons caches and locations of suspected guerrillas, but many Iraqis dismiss those reports as haphazard and sometimes motivated by personal gain. The emphasis in recruitment, although not exclusively, appears to be on the intelligence service known as the mukhabarat, one of four branches in Saddam’s government. The mukhabarat, whose name itself inspired fear, was the foreign intelligence service, the most sophisticated of the four. Within that service, officials have reached out to agents who once worked on Syria and Iran, Iraqi officials and former intelligence agents say. (LAT-WP)
